


In A Station of the Metro

by orphan_account



Category: Kill la Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Ambiguity, Drabble, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Incest, Memories, Missed Connection, Past Lives, Reincarnation, inspired by ezra pound, memories of a past life, this is more a thought/imagery exercise than anything tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 08:22:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4953214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"<i>The apparition of these faces in the crowd;</i><br/><i>Petals on a wet, black bough</i>."</p>
            </blockquote>





	In A Station of the Metro

Ryuko spent the day busking. It had been raining since before she woke up- and would probably rain long after she went to bed- fat droplets spattering against the window of her gritty studio apartment. The water washed the colour out of the sky and left it in shades of grey, the clouds indistinguishable from the city smog.

Her pockets chimed with change as she walked through the underground station, the meagre fruits of her labour. It might buy a takeaway for her and her overexcitable roommate, she supposed, something which Mako would probably be disproportionately grateful for. The floor in the station was wet with rainwater carried in on people’s shoes.

The girl with the guitar case was lucky to catch her train at just the right time. It was mostly empty, and she sank down gratefully into one of the tired felt seats. Her guitar case thunked onto the floor next to her sneakers with a thick metallic clank, and Ryuko sighed as she leaned back in the chair. She liked to think that she had made a reputation for herself, now; the raggedy girl with the painted-scarlet guitar and the peeling stickers on its case. Apparently, being a familiar sight didn’t make busking any more lucrative she still played for hours to earn next to nothing. Yet, she persisted. She wanted to play the music, after all, more than anything. Although, she really, probably, should get a real job to keep up with rent. 

The train was too quiet, and there were too many stops before home.

At the next stop, only a minute or so from where Ryuko had boarded, the doors opened to let on a new influx of passengers- a single, solitary passenger, most likely a straggler from the commuters who had crowded the subway an hour earlier. Ryuko didn’t glance up from her phone, which she had dug out of her pocket to text her roommate about where, exactly, she should pick up takeaway from tonight since neither of them had miraculously learned to cook since the day before. She might never have looked up at all, but a pair of electric blue high heels clicked into her line of vision as the newcomer sat down directly across from her. Ryuko’s gaze flickered up, curious about who was wearing such impressively ostentatious high heels on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon that was just beginning to slip into the evening.

The woman folded neatly into the seat, setting her feet on the floor with a loud, dramatic, _click_.

Ryuko’s eyes widened. 

The stranger’s hair was jet black, shorn short- like Ryuko’s- but shorter even than that, barely reaching her chin. And it was straighter, softer, infinitely more elegant. And yet as she gazed at her, inexplicably, she found herself remembering silky black locks cascading down a naked, curved back…

She looked secure, Ryuko thought. That was the word for her. Her gaze was downcast, focused on the tablet in her lap as she tapped at the screen with efficient, yet manicured nails. Faint creased appeared on her face where she frowned, full brows pulling together, and her lips were set in a hard line. Even sitting she was tall, broad, radiating strength. She so perfectly straddled the line between girlhood and being a woman (one her admirer had yet to cross) that her face became ageless, her birthdate impossible to place. She could have been only as old as Ryuko, or as the universe itself.

Ryuko thought she was the most beautiful woman that she had ever seen. She could feel her jaw slacken, even, as she stared at her, her own lips parting just a little while her eyes widened. The woman sitting across from her seemed to have her own gravitational pull, like she reordered the whole carriage around herself. Yet she she there cool and impassive, unfazed by the effect that she had. She was an ice queen, implacable, sculpted of beauty and power and utterly out of place in this crowded, cheap public transport setting. 

Ryuko could talk to her. She was right there in front of her eyes, a living and breathing goddess. She could strike up a conversation, get her number, make something between them. The clarity with which she saw their potential life together in her mind’s eyes was startling. It played out behind her eyes like a series of well-remembered scenes from a favourite film.

She saw herself and the woman, as close as possible to one another, staring at each other with eyes as hard as diamonds. Ryuko could feel her body pressed against hers, hard muscles and the contrasting softness of her breasts. She felt her hands on her, hurting as often as healing. Her kisses would bruise, Ryuko remembered, and her pretty nails left scars on her skin. There was an image in her mind of the woman, naked under virgin white sheets with the moonlight reflecting in her eyes, and Ryuko’s breath all caught up in her lungs at the disbelief of being able to touch something so goddamn beautiful. Beautiful, and terrible. 

Just like they were. The visions of herself with this woman made her stomach twist with guilt, disgust, loathing that she couldn’t decide was directed at herself or the stranger. This girl she would call _bitch_ and _darling_ in the same moaning, panting breath, who’s feverish, sex-flushed skin burned to the touch like the hellfire she’d damned her to. Wanting her was wrong, but that didn’t make it stop. She saw- she _craved_ \- her hands on her, her hips, the curve of her waist with her own fingers gripping and pulling at her clothes. The woman wore ironic white brushed with gold and blue, and Ryuko remembered the animal growl in her throat and the desire burning hot in the pit of her stomach as she tore her wretched wedding dress from her frame. 

As well as remembering, Ryuko _wanted_. She’d never understood people who fell so easily for strangers on the street, letting mysterious lovely faces haunt their heads for days. Now, she understood. With just an unrequited glance, she was under this woman’s spell, and she _wanted_ her. Wanted her more than she wanted to see her roommate smile, more than she wanted to play her cherry red guitar with the scissor sticker by the strings, more than she wanted to know why her father’s work had always been more important to him than his own daughter. 

Ryuko remembered fucking her. But she wanted so much more than that. She wanted dinner dates with candles on the table and lazy days spent in front of the television, wanted martial arts sparring and bickering, making breakfast in bed and sharing sweet good morning kisses and biting, toothy ones at night. It was silly, and she knew it. This woman was a complete stranger- she didn’t even know her name, let alone whether she would enjoy action movies and salted popcorn cuddled up on the couch with Ryuko. But she wanted that, this ambitious relationship, with a force beyond her eighteen years which knocked the breath out of her. 

There was more than that, too. Ryuko wanted this woman badly enough to falsely remember angry, illicit sex with her, and to desire so much more. In the back of her mind, however, there was something more. This stranger seemed familiar to her, and not in the way of someone seen on her train every day. She was familiar in the way that an old friend was familiar, an ex-lover glimpsed in the street. It made her heart hurt with the wealth of feelings it brought back to her- fury and hate, bitterness, lust and adoration and _love_ \- but she knew, she _knew_ that she had never seen this woman before, as much as she knew there was something heartbreakingly familiar about the angles of her face, her white skirt-suit and her bright blue shoes. 

Ryuko stared. She stared openly, a frown on her face, her mouth open in awe at the woman’s beauty and confusion over the way that she made her feel. Even as she did it, she knew she should have known better. Somehow, she knew this stranger was sharp.

The woman looked up.

She had diamond eyes, steel blue and harder than Ryuko’s head. She felt naked under her gaze, stripped bare of her clothes and her skin and her blood as the woman stared into the beating core of her. Ryuko knew those eyes. She knew _her_. Words assaulted her mind, and she was somehow certain that once they had all meant the same thing.

Lover. 

Sister.

_Satsuki_.

Ryuko couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think- couldn’t think, of anything but that name. She heard a litany of it in her head, over and over. _Satsuki, Satsuki, Satsuki_. She didn’t know how she knew it was the woman’s name, but she knew it as well as she knew who she was. 

As well as she knew that she had loved her. Loved her, lusted for and hated her in equal measures, but loved her more than anything all the same. 

Loved her and lost her, too. She’d hardly had her in the first place, but even if the specifics were lost to her she remembered how she’d slipped through her fingers in another life, like so much sand. Fate and blood had turned against them, and then time, and she had lost her.

But she was here again now. Here, right in front of her, _looking_ at her. Surely she had to remember it too. The earthquake inside Ryuko’s chest felt like it should shake the whole carriage- Satsuki had to feel it too. She opened her mouth to speak; she had no idea what to say, but she knew that it had to be something. That this woman was important, and she couldn’t let go of her again.

Quite suddenly, the train stopped. The pleasant, pre-recorded voice that announced the stations cut through Ryuko’s thoughts like a knife. Across from her, the woman looked away, breaking their gaze to glance outside of the train’s windows. Moving neatly, with breathtaking grace, she stood up from her seat and slid her tablet into her bag as she made her way to the opened train doors.

Still dazed, it took Ryuko a moment to realise what was happening. When she did, she let out a startled cry and jumped up, abandoning her guitar case for the sake of dashing for the doors, after the dark-haired beauty who had disappeared through them. She thought she might have shouted something- ‘stop,’ or ‘wait,’ or, 

“ _Satsuki_!”

She reached them just as they closed, her hands banging uselessly against the glass. Fumbling fingers found the button to open them again, and she hammed against it, but nothing happened. Eyes wide, she watched from the window as the woman in the white skirt and stockings made her way down the platform, heading to the stairs that would take her above ground. Just before the train vanished back into the tunnel, she stepped onto the first one, beginning her ascent.

Then the view outside of the windows was swallowed by blackness, and the woman was gone. 

The city had simply swallowed her up, and Ryuko knew that she would never be able to find her again.

Ryuko’s breath returned to her. She blinked, as if in the sudden absence of a bright light. Slowly, deliberately ignoring the confused and pitiful looks from the other passengers, she returned to her seat and sat there, staring at the floor as she waited for her stop.

Silly- she didn’t know what had come over her. She hadn’t known the woman on the train, at least not in the way that she remembered- that was impossible.

And yet.

The click of a heel so high it might have been an ivory tower, such long black hair, frantic fingers unlacing a wedding gown, sister, _lover_ …

Ryuko remembered. 

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by ezra pound's 'in a station of the metro', with which the fic therefore shares a title, and the summary is made up of the poem's text. so i don't own that poem any more than i own kill la kill.
> 
> the tags explain what's going on; i'm not sure if the fic does, i was trying to be artsy and subtle
> 
> this is also entirely unbeta'd so feel free to point out any errors! i most likely missed them all lmao


End file.
